The Barefoot Painter Who's Shaking Up the Art World

Long overlooked, postwar Japanese painter Kazuo Shigara is leading a renaissance of Gutai art.

Kazuo Shiraga wasn't afraid to get his hands, or feet, dirty. Often considered to be Japan's answer to Jackson Pollock, the artist is best known for his eccentric process, which involved chucking paint at a canvas on the floor and smearing it with his bare feet while suspended from a ceiling-bound rope. Long an overlooked member of the Gutai Art Association—the avant-garde collective formed by Jiro Yoshihara against the backdrop of war-devastated 1950's Japan—Shiraga didn't have his first solo show until after his death. But recently, he's emerged as the sleeper hit of the Gutai movement and is the subject of four exhibitions this season in Dallas and New York.

The largest opened earlier this month in Dallas, a natural site for Shiraga's rentrée, given that Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, one of the most influential art-buying couples worldwide and local benefactors of the Dallas Museum of Art, are also among Shiraga's top collectors. A handful of other prominent collectors, along with the artist Paul McCarthy and the Belgian antiques mega-dealer Axel Vervoordt joined them in celebrating the opening weekend of Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga, a triumphant collaboration between the DMA and the Japan Foundation in Tokyo that places Shiraga alongside another Gutai contemporary, Motonaga.

"It's terrible to say this in the States, where Pollock is still one of the most important artists…but I'm more touched by Shiraga," Vervoordt confessed in a panel discussion with McCarthy. Shiraga's association with Pollock did nothing to distance him from the view, at the time, of Gutai as derivative of Western abstract expressionism. Even within the collective, his hallmark style was criticized by Yoshihara as gimmicky—a harsh sentence from the man whose founding creed was "Create what has never been done before." (Ironically, books found in Jackson's collection after his death imply that Jack the Dripper himself found inspiration in Gutai members' work.)

Translating literally as "concrete" or "embodiment," Gutai, which was active from 1954 to 1972, emphasized the physical connection between artist and material. Videos of Shiraga painting in his studio, often aided by his wife, reveal the painter engaged in a violent dance with the canvas; what emerge are sculptural imprints alive with kinetic energy—some even claim the paint is still pliant. (Shiraga and his wife as a creative team is at the heart of Fergus McCaffrey Gallery's Kazuo and Fujico Shiraga.)

What's interesting about Shiraga's moment—which includes two more gallery shows, Body and Matter at Dominique Levy and Kazuo Shiraga at Robert Mnuchin—is that it marks not only a growing Western interest in postwar Japanese art but also a deepened one. Where shows like the Guggenheim's 2013 Gutai: Splendid Playground sketched an introductory overview of the movement, this year's lineup graduates to a more nuanced examination of the individuals who shaped Gutai. At the DMA, two artists' work hangs side by side, but there's no effort to reconcile Motonaga's fluid, playful temperament with Shiraga's complete bodily surrender to his art.

"When I first discovered Shiraga, I thought, how is it possible that this man, in his healthy, pure mind, could make himself so free?" Vervoordd said during the roundtable, revisiting the Pollock-Shiraga connection. "Pollock had to get drunk."

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